Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Electric motors and batteries have improved substantially over the past one hundred years, but today’s much hyped electric cars have a range that is – at best – comparable to that of their predecessors at the beginning of the 20th century. Weight, comfort, speed and performance have eaten up any real progress. We don’t need better batteries, we need better cars.
The news was dominated this week by the race against time to stem the flow of oil from the Transocean Deepwater rig disaster, and the potentially devastating ecological impact of the spill. BP’s mitigation effort has been painfully slow to watch, and once again placed a spotlight on the high risk world of deepwater oil extraction.
The Gulf of Mexico “spill” is really a man-made underwater volcano of oil. This accident taps a primeval fear in the human mind. Something dark and uncontrollable rushes out of the Earth, poisoning the global oceans. Could that really happen? Richard Heinberg, Anita Burke, Riki Ott, Antonia Juhasz, and new song “Corporate Catastrophe”.
When a society’s problems are caused by too much complexity, adding more layers of complexity is a recipe for more problems. In the abstract, this is easy enough to grasp, but applying it in practice is quite another matter. Fortunately, the writings of maverick economist EF Schumacher come to the rescue with another of his counterintuitive but valuable insights.
The drawing of parallels between industrial accidents is a dubious armchair sport, but here the parallels are just piling up and are becoming too hard to ignore.
Peak oil theorists predict an impending terminal decline of world oil production, with no adequate alternate resource and technology available to replace oil as the backbone resource of industrial society. Instead of endlessly debating whether peak oil theorists are right or wrong, let us simply ask what would happen if they were right. Based on historical case studies I suggest that there would be different reactions in different parts of the world, ranging from predatory militarism to authoritarian retrenchment and the mobilization of local resilience.
-Groundhog Day for Oil
-Oil disaster may prove tipping point for world oil production
-Mother of all gushers could kill Earth’s oceans
-Peak Oil and the Return of the Jet Set
-Not So Fast: With Gas Prices Low, A Return To Oil
-Caution Required for Gulf Oil Spill Clean-Up, Bioremediation Expert Says
Get used to it, baby: if there were an easier available place to find new oil than a mile beneath the sea, they’d be drilling there. The accident in the Gulf of Mexico, however damaging it is already, however widely it may spread, is minor compared with what is happening, invisibly, above our heads. That’s the message of Bill McKibben’s new book, Eaarth, and what he’s been warning about for over two decades.
It gives me the greatest pleasure this morning to launch the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website. The site makes the full version of the UK’s first EDAP freely available, invites comments and discussion, and will act as a dynamic portal for people to discuss the Plan and reshape subsequent revisions.
Occasionally you come across an anti-peak-oil polemic that’s so self-defeating that it makes you wonder if our problems might not in fact be a lot greater, and more urgent, than you had previously considered.
-BP Fought Safety Measures at Deepwater Oil Rigs
-Toyota’s Bill Reinert on Peak Oil
-How Bad Is the Oil Spill? Ask the Pelicans
-Asean members try to forge agreement on oil and gas rich Spratly Islands
-Track the Gulf of Mexico oil spill movement in animated graphic
-Response options for BP oil spill
I’ve spent the last two days at the Institute for the Future’s Ten-Year Forecast retreat in Sausalito, CA…At this retreat, I introduced ideas relating to peak net energy, and the possibility of major changes in the years ahead. I found industry leaders much more open than I had expected to listening to and understanding our energy predicament, and talking about what may be ahead. In this post, I would like to tell you about my experience.
